John Poelstra

Bringing order to chaos and clarity to confusion

Page 20 of 33

10 Reasons I Don’t Follow You on Twitter

I’m not a huge twitter user, though I have found it to be an interesting and useful medium.  I don’t automatically follow everyone that follows me and in general I don’t follow back if: You’ve never tweeted anything or you… Continue Reading →

Throw Me Over A Waterfall

I’ve been skimming Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson.  It’s fairly dense reading so I’ve been skimming through to sections that catch my interest. This section about innovative environments from page 148 was striking: Innovative environments thrive on… Continue Reading →

Project Management Tip of the Day

Riffing on a theme from Rework… I believe the project management structure and process framework of team should be a little less than “just enough.”  Anything more wastes people’s time and becomes more about the process than shipping (thank you… Continue Reading →

Finding the 9/11 Memorial at Logan Airport

I was at Logan International in Boston last week with several hours to kill before meeting up with my ride.  After pursuing Massport’s listing of things to do I came across the 9/11 Memorial–a memorial to all of the people… Continue Reading →

Irrelevant Employment

I tripped across a few things yesterday that seemed related in one way or another. Julien Smith has a simple guide on how to quit your job in 12 easy steps.  The quitting part might be easy, but the paying the… Continue Reading →

Making Python Bugzilla Work

I’ve been a big fan of python bugzilla for a long time and used it often in Fedora to gather bugs for the release blocker meetings.  If you aren’t familiar with python bugzilla, it is a very useful library and… Continue Reading →

Shame and Vulnerability

Below is a thought provoking Ted Talk by Brene Brown called The Power of Vulnerability.  Brene talks with a sparkle in her eye and exudes a contagious enthusiasm as she explores this difficult subject.  I find vulnerability really easy to… Continue Reading →

Graduating From The Sheriff’s Citizen Academy

As if 2011 wasn’t busy enough with the new projects I took on (you have tried OpenShift, right?) I also managed to find an extra 55 hours over the past few months to attend a really interesting program put on by… Continue Reading →

Portland Blind Cafe

I was moved by Dustin Kirkland’s post about his experience at the Blind Cafe in Austin, TX.  It’s coming to Portland, Oregon, in a few weeks (June 2-4, 2011) and really looks worth checking out. I’m drawn to out-of-the-ordinary experiences like… Continue Reading →

Amazon Makes a Great Apology

A few weeks ago many users of the vendor Epsilon issued a pathetic apology for the potential leak of customer information.  In complete contrast Amazon Web Services (AWS) made a substantial  apology for the outage they experienced. Not only did AWS… Continue Reading →

Try Out OpenShift Today

I couldn’t be prouder of today’s OpenShift (PAAS–Platform as a Service) cloud announcement by Red Hat. It’s not often that you get to be project manager on a release this big or exciting. It was a massive team effort involving… Continue Reading →

RIP Fedora Talk

I was sad to read Kevin Fenzi’s post about Fedora Talk closing down.  Fedora Talk was a Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone system running Asterisk, freely available to anyone with a Fedora account. I thought it was a great service with… Continue Reading →

Are Your Meetings Toxic?

Rework has a chapter called “Meetings are Toxic.”  Like several chapters in the book, this one closed with some punchy advice.  If you must have a meeting they suggest the following: Set a timer.  When it rings, meeting’s over. Period…. Continue Reading →

Almost Sorry

The other day I received two emails from separate companies letting me know that their database marketing vendor Epsilon had been hacked, both using the same text for their message. Dear Customer: We were notified by our database marketing vendor, Epsilon,… Continue Reading →

Turn Off The Email Torrent

With two major projects in flight and a third one heating up I’ve been looking for a better way to feel less overwhelmed by the torrent of email–a way to recapture the feeling of peace that comes working late on… Continue Reading →

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